Day 106 - 23 Mar 95 - Page 14
1 MR. JUSTICE BELL: What sort of period of time would you need to
2 see the results of testing for to make some kind of
3 judgment?
4 A. My Lord, it is not only a period of time; it is the
5 method of sampling which is crucial, absolutely crucial, to
6 determine whether or not you will find anything. You can
7 sample to kingdom come and not find anything at all if your
8 sampling protocol is not accurate, even though it may be
9 there at quite high levels.
10
11 MR. JUSTICE BELL: At some stage you had better ask Mr. North
12 what he knows about McKey sampling, what he saw and whether
13 he asked to see more than he saw, and so on, because in his
14 statement anyway he said he was offered every facility at
15 all the places he visited.
16
17 MR. MORRIS: What is your opinion on the statement regarding
18 food poisoning in general or food-borne diseases, that
19 chicken and minced meat as used in burgers are the worst
20 offenders, that statement, what do you think of that?
21 A. Can you locate that statement for me?
22
23 Q. Yes, it is in your paragraph 9 ---
24 A. Right.
25
26 Q. -- in your statement.
27
28 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I am going to rise for 10 minutes now. What
29 I would like you to do, the reason I want to do that is
30 I would like you to look, purely and simply because it will
31 help me, again at the proof of evidence. I would like you
32 to look at the reports of visits as well and to decide
33 precisely which paragraphs you would like Mr. North to
34 aver, because I will then take them as part of his evidence
35 and I will not take the other parts of his statement as
36 parts of his evidence, unless he says the same thing in due
37 course or unless, for instance, Mr. Rampton in
38 cross-examination asks him, does he still agree with that
39 paragraph. Do you understand?
40
41 I have to be very careful when I have read statements of
42 all the witnesses before they come to give evidence to
43 exclude from my considerations in due course those parts
44 which they have not averred. Do you remember we had this
45 with regard to Mr. Hayden's statement ---
46
47 MR. MORRIS: Yes.
48
49 MR. JUSTICE BELL: -- and what Mr. Hawkes said about that. So,
50 you do not have to put anything you do not want but,
51 equally, you have to be sure you have got in that which you
52 do want.
53
54 As an example, for instance, it may have been watered down
55 now by what Mr. North has said about the difficulty of
56 making any real assessment of what proportion of incidence
57 of food poisoning are actually confirmed, but you might
58 want (7) in as well as the (4) to (6) which you asked for.
59 I would have thought you might well want (9) as a
60 springboard for the kind of question you have just asked
